Eighteen journalists - including two Pulitzer Prize winners - have started a campaign to award a posthumous Pulitzer to a reporter who broke one of the biggest stories in World War II and was fired as a result.

The reporter was Edward Kennedy of the Associated Press, and his story was the scoop of a lifetime: He was the first to report the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II in Europe. His dispatch was accurate, but he defied political and military censors who wanted to keep the surrender secret for 36 hours.

Kennedy refused to hold on to the news and broke a military embargo, angering Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, and all the other newsmen he had scooped. The military lifted his war correspondent's credential, he was threatened with court martialand was fired by the Associated Press.

He went on to a distinguished career as an editor in California. But the stigma of what happened at the end of World War II stayed with him for the rest of his life. He died at the age of 58 after an automobile accident in Monterey in 1963.

AP apologizes

This past spring, 67 years after the event, Tom Curley, president of the Associated Press, apologized for what happened. The Kennedy incident, he said, "was handled in the worst possible way. It was a terrible day for the AP."

Kennedy's action in 1945 "was the right thing to do and beyond reproach," he said.

But the group of journalists, most of them from Northern California, want to go further: They want the Pulitzer Prize committee to issue an award to Kennedy for what he did.

"It is an opportunity to correct history here," said Ray March, a veteran reporter and editor who worked for Kennedy after the war when Kennedy was editor of the Monterey Peninsula Herald.

What happened to Kennedy, March said, was "a classic manipulation of the news." The reporter "was screwed by an unethical system," he said.

Honoring Kennedy for his enterprise in reporting the truth in a timely manner, March said, "is a matter of principle."

Backers organize

The journalists who signed on to the campaign to award Kennedy Pulitzer recognition include Sal Veder, a retired Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer in 1973, and Kim Komenich, a professor at San Jose State University and former Chronicle photographer. He won a Pulitzer for his work in the Philippines in 1987, when he was on the staff of the San Francisco Examiner.

Joseph Legaspi, assistant administrator to the Pulitzer Prizes, said Kennedy could be eligible for a special Pulitzer citation, but his supporters will have to make the case in their application.

Kennedy himself was a veteran foreign correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War and other developments leading up to World War II. After the war broke out, he spent five years as a correspondent in North Africa, Italy and France.

When the war was nearing a close, Kennedy was Associated Press bureau chief in Paris. Early in May 1945, he and a handful of other reporters were flown from Paris to Reims, France, for what they were told was an important event.

They were taken to a red brick schoolhouse and watched as German Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl and Adm. Hans-Georg von Freideburg signed a document of unconditional surrender in the early hours of May 7. They were eyewitnesses to history.

The reporters were told that the news of the surrender could not be announced right away. The reason was not clear, but later U.S. and British headquarters said they wanted to hold on to the news for 36 hours, so the Soviets could stage another surrender ceremony in Berlin the next day.

All the reporters agreed to this. But Kennedy learned that the Germans had announced their own surrender in an official broadcast from Flensburg in northern Germany.

War was over

Because the town was under Allied occupation, Kennedy concluded that the embargo was off. He confronted the censor and demanded immediate release of the surrender story. There was no military security involved, he said. The war was over.

He considered his function as a reporter was to report the news; he said he did not feel bound by censorship for political reasons. He telephoned London and dictated an eyewitness account.

His story began: "Germany surrendered to western allies and Russia at 2:41 a.m. French time today."

The story made page one everywhere. When he worked in Monterey, Kennedy kept a framed copy of the front page of the New York Times over his desk with his dispatch under big headlines.

"He saw clearly he was right," said March.

Many criticized him

However, everyone else at the time thought Kennedy was wrong. All the other reporters turned on him, furious that he had broken the news before they did. Eisenhower sent a message saying Kennedy was suspended as a war correspondent "for deliberate violations of ... regulations and breach (of) confidence."

He was shipped back to the United States and quietly fired.

After the war, he wrote a memoir about the war and about wartime censorship. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, discovered it after her father's death.

Several publishers turned it down, but this spring Louisiana State University published "Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press." Ed Kennedy has come full circle.

"Kennedy's story will be complete if he were to be posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize," March said. "Nothing less."